Last spring, Williams Randall got a new neighbor: a 22-year-old who just moved here from another part of the Midwest. This recent college grad (BA in Marketing, 3.64 GPA) is just starting her professional career, having accepted a position at an Indianapolis firm right across the street from our offices.

In so many ways, she’s like any new college graduate joining the workforce for the first time. She’s entered an industry with its own set of terms, rules and protocols, and is doing her best to learn and navigate it on the fly while looking around for a place to live in a new city. 

In so many other ways, however, she’s unlike any other 22-year-old on earth, because the street she’s across is Maryland Street, her new employer is The Indiana Fever, the position she accepted is “point guard,” and her name is Caitlin Clark, A.K.A. employee number 22.

The moment Caitlin Clark entered the WNBA draft (seemingly about five seconds after the buzzer sounded in her final collegiate game), several things became immediately clear: 

1. She’d be coming to Indianapolis (our home team Fever had the first pick) 
2. She’d be different from other incoming rookies, in terms of her skillset (highly advanced), her popularity (unprecedented), and the expectations she'd shoulder (gigantic) 
3. Things were about to get very interesting in our neighborhood

The Indiana Fever’s season tipped off on May 14th at the Mohegan Sun Arena, in Connecticut. Incredibly, it ended in the exact same place on September 25th, when the Connecticut Sun eliminated the Fever from the WNBA playoffs’ first round. Between those dates, one of the more fascinating seasons in American sport – any American sport – played out in real time to the joy, chagrin, amazement, amusement, disappointment, anger, elation, frustration and, ultimately, sheer delight of our neighborhood, city, state, nation …and a fairly sizable chunk of the globe. 

How often does anything that hyped-up actually deliver on the hype, with interest? It was the most compelling sports story in America for an entire summer – an entire Olympic summer. Highs and lows, cheers and groans, ups and downs …and all with a single constant: Caitlin. She just played ball, said the right things – seemed to mean them, too – didn’t allow herself to get baited, didn’t retaliate against haters (except through her increasingly more excellent play), just kept learning and growing. She just played ball, making her teammates first into believers, then into a team, then into a contender. She signed a WHOLE LOT of jerseys for her fans, whose numbers swelled to roughly the population of Argentina. She just played ball, and never lost sight of the joy she found there. And that joy was infectious. How infectious? Well, the attendance at Fever games went up 426% percent from 2023 to 2024, so… yeah, pretty infectious. 

Really, all she did here this past summer was resurrect a team (and league), transform an entire industry and rewrite the global conversation on gender in sport. Wonder what her second season will be like?

Welcome to the neighborhood, CC. We love that you’re here. And if, after the seventh championship, you get bored and want to put that marketing degree to work, well …we are just across the street, after all. You probably won’t even have to change your parking spot.